Posts Tagged ‘Lichtenstein’

Belgian painter, roughly painted scenes of flagellation, animal mutilation and anal intercourse in a pastoral setting. Hints of Breugel in the settings and busyness, Raqib Shaw in the shock content, plain to see but small enough to miss unless you look properly and early Per Kirkeby a little, in the general look of the paintings. These comparisons make the work sound much better than it is, I have to say.

Cork Street

Some great painting to be seen at the moment; I don’t bother with the names of the galleries – just drop in to all of them.

At the Adam Gallery – big semi-abstract canvases using staining, runs down, “spattering” (looks like, but apparently he does it with masking fluid) and a variety of other techniques that produce busy canvases reminiscent of Albert Oehlen or even Ofili, as regards shapes and colours.

Kurt Schwitters

A number of beautiful small collages that match some of the best ones at the current Tate Britain show.

Eva Hesse at Hauser and Wirth, Savile Row

This is a great free show, not to be missed. Drawings of Heath Robinson-type stuff – but not quite. They remind you of domestic appliances: bedside lights, food mixers, cables, plugs, but they’re not. Smaller ones are vividly coloured, blues, reds… larger ones contain some blatant phallic tubing, and several look like dressmaking patterns – but not quite! The one I want is in the corner – a white horn shape contained within a looping drawing on parchment. There are also some hybrids – vividly coloured plaques with sculpted centres and “protuberances” poking or dangling, or just clinging to them. Great drawings, beautifully executed and witty. Sort of anti-Vandenberg.

Photographers Gallery

Went again to see the Letinsky. Two of those food and paper collages are quite powerful – they are the darker ones and dominate all the other pictures. One looks, from a distance, like mist boiling up a cliff side, the fruit dropping over the edge into the void. Or not – it’s only fruit on a tablecloth…

Upstairs, on the fifth floor, the collages of Jan Svoboda; textured wall surfaces, framed to make lovely abstracts.

Roy Lichtenstein at Tate Modern

Student bedroom poster stuff; it’s so well known, needs no description from me. His stuff leaves me cold, although I admit it has an immediate impact and is historically vital, original, vibrant and so on. I don’t get much out of it because there’s no texture. The only ones I liked were the small ones where he’d done gestural strokes across the flat surfaces, giving it a bit of roughness. A.ll the critics I’ve read ignored or dismissed those ones.

de Kooning

His painting “Whose Name was Writ on Water”, completed in 1975, apparently had areas of soft paint that started to “bleed” down the canvas – only an inch or so, but movement all the same – in 1997! Perhaps those stories about Auerbach’s surfaces slipping glacially weren’t myths after all…

Le Serpent

Another of those French thrillers in which a wealthy media/arts/TV bourgeois is targeted by someone he victimised in childhood (Hidden). The French seem to love to torture the self-satisfied, leftie, softy middle classes – “Lemmings”, maybe, fits in here too. OK, “Hidden” is Michael Haneke, so it’s director is not French – but it feels like a real French film. Great villain in Serpent, though.